Parallels 10 on new iMac Retina 5K

M

milleron

Member
Is there reason to be concerned that Parallels Desktop 10 might have trouble running Windows on the newly-announced iMac 27" with Retina 5K display -- i.e., does Parallels use the Mac's display driver or does it depend on a Windows driver for that? If the latter, then I'm hesitant to purchase the new iMac because of worry about Windows drivers being incompatible with Apple's proprietary Timing Controller (see the video on this product on Apple's Web site). Not being a computer engineer, I'd never heard of a Timing Controller, or "TCon," as they call it in the Apple video, and I've really no idea if display drivers have to interact with it or not, but if they do, my antennae are tingling about a potential problem here. If they don't, especially if Parallels Desktop relies on the Mac's own display driver when running its virtual machines, then I'll probably order one of these new Macs.
(Apple does state that Windows can be installed via Boot Camp on this machine. If that's true, it would alleviate my fear about Windows drivers, but I don't know if this statement about Boot Camp has been verified yet.)
 
I have the new Retina iMac running PD10 and Windows 8.1. After a week, it seems to be working ok. To get coherence to work properly I had to increase the video memory. We use Microsoft Office in a web hosted environment and some of those programs aren't as finely detailed as the web browser but for my use everything is fine.
 
A VM under Parallels does not 'talk' directly with the GPU, there's no reason to be concerned, in fact Parallels installs it's own video drivers via Parallels Tools.
 
I just purchased my new Retina iMac and run PD 10 and Windows 7 Ultimate. It worked well on my last 27" iMac (late 2013 model) and it is working on the new Retina iMac but with some display problems. I run it in parallel with OSX and it is not partitioned on my hard drive. Because of the 5K display, the Windows icons are "tiny" and difficult to read, along with the programs. I changed the display settings and it was acceptable. Unfortunately, it defaults back to the 5K display if you restart the computer or log off of Windows! Any help with this would be appreciated.
 
Regarding my post above, I found the solution. Under Parallels, go to "configure" and select "video". Change to "scaled" and shut down VM. This will keep the new settings and no longer will you have tiny icons.
 
I have just bought a new iMac Retina 5k and have the same issue. Restarting the VM always reverts to maximum resolution when "Enable Retina Resolution" option is selected, but there are no scaling options - is this going to be added for the 5k iMac - this model has now been out for a number of months, I would have expected some support by now...
 
I've had problems with screen refreshes on iMac Retina. I increased video memory to 2GB and that seems to have solved the problems.
 
Is there going to be any specific support for the Retina iMac? I would love to be able to benefit from the Retina display but have a scaled display setting like apparently you can on the Retina MacBooks.
 
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